Druid tactic
= Basics = Tips *Shapeshifting will release you from Entangled Roots, Frost Nova, and other spells that pin you. *Do not cast Wrath or Starfire once close combat has started. *If you are Tauren, and get into trouble, use Stomp. This can give you enough time to run, or start a Healing Touch on yourself. *Tie Rejuvenation and Regrowth to macros that automatically cast on yourself. *Cast your spells in "bursts". Your mana will not regenerate for 5 seconds after you cast a spell, regardless of whether or not you are in combat. It is more mana-effectient to cast several spells at the same time and then wait for your mana to regenerate than to cast single spells at various times during a fight. Be Prepared Mark of the Wild and Thorns should be on all the time. The only exception is that you may want to turn off Thorns while trying to use Hiberation. There is currently a bug in which a monster can hit you right as you cast the spell but before thorns does it's damage, causing the Hibernation effect to be broken. The same is true with Sap, Polymorph, and similar effects that break on damage. If you have Alchemy, maintain a supply of defensive potions to use when you go out. Drink them before you leave town. Soloing Druids work well as a soloing class. Pull the enemy creature with a Wrath spell to draw them away from other creatures that would gang up on you. Learn the maximum distance of your Wrath spell, and be in the habit of casting from there. While the Wrath bolt is still traveling to the enemy, cast Moonfire. Follow this with Entangling Roots. Move back to the limit of your Wrath spell and repeat. You should be burning through your mana until you have just enough to switch to Bear form. If you are patient, you can tackle powerful creatures in this manner without endangering yourself. If you run out of mana while soloing a creature, Entangling Roots can save your life. Root the creature and then just stand back and wait for your mana to regenerate. Once you have enough mana, cast Entangling Roots again. If it is not resisted or immediately removed, heal yourself. Otherwise cast it again. Repeat the process. Entangling Roots does a small amount of damage. When you feel comfortable with your health vs the creatures health, move up and start hitting it with melee or save up mana for a Moonfire. You shouldn't have too much trouble finishing it off. Note: This trick might not work if your spirit is very low. Train up First Aid for healing between fights in order to save mana and maintain the highest efficiency. Bear Form Know how much mana you need for Bear form. If you have just used Entangled Roots before shapeshifting, cast Enrage to get enough Rage to cast Demoralizing Roar. Enrage will also give you enough Rage to cast Maul. Enrage is also very useful against players and monsters that primarily cast spells on you because the spells go right through armor anyway. Cat Form Cat form is most useful when used to initiate combat because you can do a lot of damage quickly, but it takes 10 seconds to fully recharge your energy. With full energy, prowl up to your target from behind and use either (1) Pounce and then Shred (for increased combo points), or (2) Tiger's Fury and Ravage (for maximum damage). Follow up with any combination of attacks that give combo points. Use Rip once you have accumulated 3 or 4 combo points (a 5 point Rip is usually wasted because the monster dies before much of the damage takes effect). For stronger mobs, at this point you should return to caster form and heal if low on health. Also, it is sometimes wise to cast Moonfire and then Entangling Roots so that you can simply stand back and let the damage over time debuffs tick down. Against weaker enemies, a Rip can be followed by Tiger's Fury and a Claw or two, which should quickly drain their remaining health. If you get in trouble and you're not sure if you can kill the monster before it kills you, don't try to heal yourself. It will take too much time. Instead, pop into caster form and cast Moonfire a few times to finish it off. An alternative use of Cat form is to initiate a fight in caster form with Starfire and Moonfire (or a Root-Wrath-Moonfire-Wrath sequence), cast Rejuvenation on yourself, and then shift to Cat form to melee. This conserves mana while keeping your health high. It is usually possible to solo an even level mob and end with 75% or more of both health and mana using this tactic. Duels & PVP Know whether your opponent is melee or ranged. If melee, such as Warriors and Paladins, you can toy with them using the pull procedure outlined in Basic Tactics. If ranged, like spell casters and Hunters, cast Stomp, Moonfire, and then Entangling Roots. When your opponent has a few hits on you, Stomp if you have one left, Regrowth, Moonfire, switch to Bear form, profit. Moonfire Moonfire is a great spell because it excels in two areas. The first is mana effeciency. Hitting a target with Moonfire will do a lot of damage over time for not too much mana. It is usually a good idea cast Moonfire on an enemy sometime during the beginning of a fight, to make sure all of the damage occurs. The second area Moonfire is great in is damage per second. Because the spell has no cooldown and does part of it's damage on the initial cast, you can rack up quite a bit of damage by simply casting it over and over on a target. The downside to doing this is that the mana effeciency with plummet. You can easily drain your mana by spamming Moonfire. Many people consider it a beginner's strategy, but there are times when mana effeciency matters much less than raw damage per second. Moonfire is essentially two spells in one and a good druid will know when to use which version of it. Party Participation Parties love Druids for their buffs--Mark of the Wild and Thorns. The Druid can take on many different roles in a party, but often times Druids are cast as the primary or secondary healer, especially at higher levels. They can also take on the role of the tank or the damage dealer. In some situations it is a good idea to go into Bear or Cat form until you, or a party member, gets low on health, at which point you switch to caster form and begin healing. If the healing is already covered, cast damage-based spells until you are low on mana, and then switch back into form. As the primary healer, Druids have three disadvantages over a Priest: * The lack of an effective fast heal (i.e. Flash Heal). Regrowth is the druid equivelent, but because it is part straight heal and part heal over time, you will end up with horrible mana effeciency if you are forced to chain cast it on a party member. Keep this in mind and try to use Healing Touch wheneven possible. * Druids have a utility ressurection spell. It is very useful in some situations. It can be used in combat, which means that with some coordination you can recover from a wipe. It also ressurects the target with much more health and mana and casts much faster than other ressurect spells. However, because it has a 30-minute cooldown, it cannot be used as the main ressurect spell. If two people die, you can only bring one back to life. * Healing draws aggro to you. If you heal too much, or if you tank fails to get the attention of all the monsters, something will come after you. There are two ways of dealing with this and both required you to give up your ability to heal temporarily. The first is to switch into Bear form. This will allow you to soak up the damage from the monster(s) attacking you until your party deals with it. Second, you can switch into Cat form and use the Cower ability, which lowers the amount of threat towards a single target. Make sure your tank knows that you do not have a Fade-type ability that will allow you to escape aggro. In multiple monster situations, the tank should use an AoE ability (such as Demoralizing Shout or a Magma Totem), to attract all monsters' attention at the beginning of the fight. A third way of dealing with aggro is to use Entangling Roots on the monster and back away, but you cannot use the spell indoors (most instances). Feral Combat and Equipment Your damage in feral mode is independent of your weapon: pick up a weapon because of the stats it possesses, not because you think you'll do more damage with it. Likewise, if you can find an off-hand item that increases useful melee stats (Strength, Stamina, or Agility), then definitely go with a one-handed item in your main hand. When in feral form, your weapon skill, attack power, and damage are all independent of the weapon you are using. However, your attack rating is impacted by your skill. Ironically, an expert fisherman druid with a pole equipped will have a higher attack rating than a druid with only 80 or 90 in an equipped weapon skill. Your attributes impact feral combat: * Strength effects power/damage * Agility effects your critical hit rate * Stamina effects your hit points * Armor rating effects your armor class. Your weapons and armor still lose durability when in feral combat. You can go unarmed, though, to save some silver and if you're willing to forego stat bonuses on those slots--make sure that your unarmed skill is high if you do this. Durability changes were introduced at the end of beta (October 2004), after they lowered the armor on bear form. The Omen of Clarity talent does not proc in feral form. Druids with this talent stay humanoid until it procs, then go feral. Your defense skill will increase in feral form. Your weapon skills will not increase while in feral form, so if you regularly melee only in feral form, your weapon skill rating will quickly fall behind your level. You can practice fighting grey mobs to improve your rating, though this is supposed to take longer. As a goal, you should try to have all of your weapon and melee skills maxed at each level. Feral Combat and the Elder Game According to the high-level beta druids, after level 40-45 or so, druids usually either stay in cat form to prowl and avoid aggro, or heal in group. Damage and armor rating do not scale well past level 40. (Likewise, according to the high level mages, mage damage fails to scale past 40.) While you can use dire bear form for soloing, or pinch-tanking in group, but your armor won't be up to the task anymore--a level 60 warrior or paladin can have over 7100 armor rating, while a druid in Dire Bear form is limited to around 3025 or so. Many druids carry around multiple sets of armor, depending on form, to get the best stats for what they're doing. After level 40, druid feral DPS fails to keep up with other classes, and after 45, druid dire bear armor drops to about half that of warriors. This is consistent with how Blizzard currently sees druids (primary healers), but inconsistent with how people play them (hybrids). Some people are playing their druids up to 60, then are planning on letting them gather dust until some feral fixes are in. They love the class, and want to be better at being druids, and are patiently waiting for the fixes. Almost everyone agrees that nothing will happen until server stability is fixed (probably in January), though with Caydiem (WoW's community person) playing a Druid, there is hope that many of the druid issues will be addressed sooner rather than later. Other people have noted that as the big population of druids gets into the 40s over the next couple of months (January-February 2005), Blizzard will be inundated with questions about why the druid "suddenly sucks" and will have to take notice of the high-level inequities. Several improvements to Feral forms have been made in early release: # In the 18-Dec-2004 patch: Bear Form: Armor bonus increased from 65% to 180%. Dire Bear Form: Armor bonus increased from 125% to 360%. This puts Dire Bear form armor in much closer alignment with heavy armor wearing classes (potentially 70-80% of a warrior's armor, instead of 40-50% as before) # In the next patch (as of 28-Feb-2005): (from Caydiem) :::"On the subject of animal forms, one of the top concerns of the community has been that cat form DPS is somewhat lacking past level 40 or so. The designers acknowledge that this is a problem and they plan on adjusting the higher-level damage to be more in line with the original concept. Keep in mind that a Druid in cat form is not supposed to have roughly the same DPS as a similarly-leveled Rogue; however, it should improve from its current incarnation. One of the changes planned is the addition of a direct-damage finishing move. This should help the Druid cat form significantly." This appears to mean that Cat form base damage will be increased, and a direct-damage finisher will also be added. It is to be hoped that this will bring Cat form DPS as compared to Rogue DPS in alignment with the changes made to Bear form (up to 70-80% from 40% or so). =PvP= General Very versatile in combat. Can approach a fight in many difference ways. Healing is very tricky against a smart opponent or a class with spell interrupts. Spells and Tactics *Rooting: Entangling Root is essential both for keeping melee opponents at bay and making casters stay put so that you can attack them in Bear or Cat form. *Kiting: Travel form (or Feline Swiftness) can be used to put distance between you and your enemy, which can be very useful while they are affected by DOTs (i.e. Moonfire, Rip). You can also use this tactic to run far enough away from them that they cannot catch up before you can get a heal off. *Talent Spells: **Nature's Grasp: (Tier 1 Balance) Gives a chance that when you are hit, the attacker will be affected by Entangling Roots. A very nice ability to have in your arsenal. It can mean the difference between life and death in combat. When playing against a melee class, cast Nature's Grasp. When it goes off, take a few paces back and heal yourself or run to your maximum range and start nuking. **Nature's Swiftness: (Tier 5 Restoration) Your next nature spell is instant cast. This is the only way you can get off a large heal without the risk of being interrupted. If you get it, it will likely save your life many times. **Feral Charge: (Tier 3 Feral) In bear form, you charge up to the target and interrupt any spell being cast. The ability to interrupt a spell at range is very useful. Feral Charge can also be used to get up to melee range when you are slowed. *Healing: Things to remember: **Don't wait until the last moment to heal. Most players will be waiting for the right opportunity to use a big finishing move while you are low on health. Heal at every opportunity you get. You should not be defeated until you run completely out of mana, and even then you might be able to pull off a win. **Regrowth and Rejuvination at the same time will only cost you two seconds to cast and will continue to heal you well through the fight. **Regrowth is faster than Healing Touch. Use Regrowth in tight situations when you need a heal right away. Use Healing Touch when you actually have a few seconds to spare. Healing Touch's effect is more immediate and the spell is more mana effecient. **Healing Spells are generally more mana effecient than damage spells. *Debuff Removal: Rogues and Warlocks will use a lot of poisons and curses on you. It is generally a good idea to remove them as soon as you see them. Cure Disease and Remove Curse are cheap compared to many of the effects they remove. Class by Class Need people to start filling in class by class tactics. - Energismus Druid Mage Hunter Paladin Priest Rogue Shaman Warlock Warrior ---- Druid,Tactics